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<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/bloom_hartman/index.html">Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom: Two Interviews</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
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<h2>Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom:<br />
Two Interviews</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">An Interview with Harold Bloom<a href=
"#1"><sup>1</sup></a></h3>
<h4 align="center">Laura Quinney, Brandeis University</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Laura Quinney</strong>: Ok, so it's November
27<sup>th</sup>, in New Haven. We're at Harold's house,
and my name is Laura Quinney. This is an interview with
Harold Bloom about his latest book <em>Jesus and
Yahweh</em>. Tell me what the epigraph was to have
been.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Harold Bloom</strong>: Well there was
originally a double epigraph. One is still there
because it explains the subtitle, <em>The Names
Divine</em>, and that is the second of the two
quatrains of the concluding "To the Accuser who is the
God of this World" of the final version of Blake's
little emblem book "For the Sexes: The Gates of
Paradise," that is to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Though thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine<br />
Of Jesus and Jehovah thou art still<br />
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline<br />
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill&mdash;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>but originally I had wanted to have with it a very
great sentence, spoken by an actual governor of Texas
back I think in the early 1930s who rejoiced in the
name of Ma Ferguson. And when this lady was inaugurated
as governor of Texas, she announced that so long as she
was governor, no state-supported school, from junior
high up through the University of Texas at Austin would
be allowed to teach any foreign language whatsoever,
and her reason for this she expressed in one very great
sentence: "If English was good enough for Jesus then I
suppose it should be good enough for us."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: [Laughs.] Thank you. I wanted
to ask you in particular about what it means to be a
Jewish Gnostic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Ah.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: In your book, in the opening
paragraphs on "The Jewish Sages on God," you write:
"The God of the Gnostics is called the Stranger or
Alien God, and has exiled himself from our cosmos,
perhaps forever. I do <em>not</em> regard Yahweh in
that way" [p. 193, Quinney's emphasis]. And yet you
describe yourself as a Gnostic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, I am partly relying upon
my great mentor Gerhard or Gershom Scholem, who in many
conversations with me, primarily in Jerusalem, but also
in Boston, New York City, and here at this table in New
Haven, would frequently say to me that the great
disaster of Kabbalah was its Neoplatonic scheme or myth
of emanation&mdash;the sephirot&mdash;and that he
greatly preferred what he called the Gnostic kabbalah
of the early Merkavah mystics, which he thought had
been renewed by Moses Cordovero, who was the teacher of
Isaac Luria, and then by Isaac Luria in which Ein Soph,
the Kabbalistic name of the infinite one, or
Yahweh&mdash;whose name you're not supposed to use, but
I am now&mdash;Ein Soph creates the universe by
contracting and withdrawing inside himself, or as I
say, going back to the original Hebrew of the Zimzum,
which means to sharply draw in or take in your
breath&mdash;it is that act which at once creates and
ruins worlds, according to Cordovero and Luria, and
those who came after them. But Gnosticism: Scholem was
convinced and Moshe Idel, to whom I am much closer in
every way&mdash;he is a close personal
friend&mdash;Moshe Idel on this agrees with Scholem
though frequently they don't: Idel says that
fundamentally he thinks that what someone like Hans
Jonas and other scholars after him have called
Gnosticism is actually a kind of parody or echo of a
kind of archaic Judaism which we don't have any more,
though you can find curious versions of it in the
different books of Enoch and other apocryphal
literature. Even when I was a little boy, the Talmudic
rabbi who fascinated me was the one denounced by all
the others in the Pirke Abboth or Sayings of the
Fathers, the rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah, whom the others
called Akah, meaning the stranger or the alien, and who
is reported to have ascended into heaven in a mystical
trance and there beheld not one God but two gods,
sitting on thrones facing each other, one being Yahweh,
and the other being Metatron, the angel of the divine
presence who simply was the transmogrified human being
Enoch after he is carried off by Yahweh to the heavens
without the necessity of first dying. There are all
kinds of complex traditions, some of them going back a
long, long way, even though we have no texts of what
could be called an original Jewish Gnosis. As I
understand Gnosticism,&mdash;and it seems to me in this
I am highly consonant with my hero Ralph Waldo Emerson,
as I am with Valentinus of Alexandria or Basilides of
Alexandria, or with Luria or Cordovero, let alone that
splendid fellow Nathan of Gaza, who wrote the treatise
on the dragons and was the spokesperson or prophet for
the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi,&mdash;Gnosticism
essentially comes down to a few convictions. One is
that the best and oldest part of every one of us, even
if we don't have immediate access to it, or easy access
to it, is part and parcel of God. (I want a very small
sliver, dear.) Another is that the creation and the
fall are not two separate events, but one and the same
event with all of the unfortunate (that's fine dear)
the unfortunate pragmatic (thank you
dear)&mdash;pragmatic consequences of this (mmm . . .
it's full of liquor; mmm, it's yummy . . . ).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: [To the tape recorder.] A
whisky cake is being consumed.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>JB</strong>: [Laughs.]</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Willie, come and have some
whisky cake. A very Yahwistic whisky cake.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Daniel Flesch:</strong> Is this yours,
Mom?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>William Flesch</strong>: Shhh . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I suppose the remaining basic
conviction of Gnosticism is that there is, besides the
divinity to which it is so hard to have access, it is
very deep in the rock of the self. There is also an
exiled component of the true God, who is not Yahweh but
presumably the Anthropos, the original man/God of the
hermeticists. Except, who knows? Akiba&mdash;Akiba who
was after all the normative rabbi, the founder of what
we call normative Judaism in the second century of the
common era, Akiba specifically said that his favorite
name for God was <em>ish</em>, which is man.
So&mdash;in any case I suppose the final tenet of
Gnosticism is that there is an exiled component of the
Godhead, but it's not in this world, which is governed
by the archons and governed by Blake's Nobodaddy as it
were, and that far off beyond our solar system, in the
cosmological outer spaces there is the&mdash;aren't you
going to give Willy some of that?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>WF</strong>: I had some.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well put it back in there: you
don't want it to go to waste.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>WF</strong>: But I might want more.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>JB</strong>: Stop talking in the
microphone.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Pussycat? Oh, I'm sorry.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: It's ok, it's ok. It can be
edited. Or not.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: It doesn't matter.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: But your Yahweh is not Blake's
Nobodaddy.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: No. No no no no no. He
is&mdash;he was for me the surprise of my book. As I
say at one point he usurped this book. Indeed he wasn't
supposed to be there at all in the first place.
Originally the title of the book was <em>Jesus and
Christ</em>, since I regard the two of them as totally
separate figures, but I found that as I got into it, it
didn't make any sense to me unless I really talked
about Yahweh, and I think the really original part of
the book is the second half, on Yahweh, which actually
goes so far as to apply Lurianic Kabbalah to the whole
question of the origin of Yahweh. You will remember
that in Kierkegaard Nebuchadnezzar, after he had been
changed back from a beast in the field to a man, says
of Yahweh, "Nobody knows who <em>his</em> father was,
or who taught him the secret of his strength" [quoted
from Quidam in <em>Stages on Life's Way</em>] and I
speculate in a perfectly Kabbalistic way, I say&mdash;I
speculate that a perfectly&mdash;aren't you going to
eat it&mdash;?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Yes I'm going to try it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: In a perfectly, I think,
Kabbalistic way that Yahweh may have come into
existence by this act of Zimzum, this act of
contraction or withdrawal, which means that he
diminished himself in order to get started. Which I
find fascinatingly parallel to Walt Whitman, in which I
again follow Scholem: who used to say in conversations
with me, that in a secular world somehow Whitman by
some miracle without knowing anything about Kabbalah
had in effect reinvented his own Kabbalah, and I think
that is true. Whitman throughout <em>Song of
Myself</em> and elsewhere is always saying that he is
expanding, that he is getting to contain more and more
multitudes, that his sense of self is steadily
increasing. But in fact he too is always contracting
and withdrawing. He is endlessly elusive and evasive,
and the worlds that he creates and ruins also seem to
come from some process of self-withdrawal.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: This may lead to my next
question, which is something that puzzles me about the
book. And that is that in some sense I was not sure why
you think of the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible as a true
description of a Deity, rather than as a . . . ?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, there are
Yahwehs&mdash;just as I say there are seven versions at
least of Jesus or Jesus Christ, or Jesus and Jesus
Christ, in the Greek New Testament, there are
innumerable versions of God in Tanakh, the Hebrew
Bible, but the one who interests me and always has and
always will, is the original one, the first Straha,
traditionally called J or the Yahwist, probably written
as early as the reign of Solomon, 3,000 years ago, in
which most certainly he is as I say a stern imp, up to
a lot of mischief, something of a trickster
God&mdash;human all too human: he's always walking
around on the ground; he isn't flying up in the
air&mdash;he's walking around on the ground in order to
make personal, you know, sort of on the job inspections
of how things are going. He closes the door of the
ark&mdash;of Noah's ark with his own hands; he even
more memorably buries Moses in an unmarked grave, with
his own hands; he is very fond of picnics; thus at
Mamre he sits beneath the terapim trees because he
always likes to be in the shade rather than the sun,
thus he walks we are told in Eden in the cool of the
day, at Mamre, with two of the Elohim who are his
angels he sits beneath the terapim trees, and he has a
sumptuous rather full-scale luncheon prepared by
Sarah&mdash;roast veal and whey and freshly baked
sort-of cakes. And how is one to put it&mdash;he on
Sinai, on the side of Sinai, he sits there and shares a
meal with 73 elders of Israel. They stare at him and he
stares at them and that's it. He doesn't say a word and
they don't say a word, but there he is. And according
to Kabbalistic tradition, from the Merkavah thing on,
he's enormous, he is I say the King Kong of deities, he
is of enormous size.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: What leads you to think of this
God as more than an exceptional fiction?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, his metaphysical density,
his ferocious and vivid personality, his intensely
human traits&mdash;I gather you're not going to eat
that so I'm going to put it back in there&mdash;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: One more bite.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Go ahead, go ahead. He is . . .
he is a . . . the reason why I keep invoking
Shakespearean characters like King Lear, who is I think
Shakespeare's version of Yahweh, or Hamlet, who has a
very complex relation I think to Mark's Jesus, is that
Yahweh, Mark's Jesus, Hamlet, King Lear, Falstaff,
Cleopatra, Iago&mdash;they are all more real than you
are, whoever you are, and yes, they are fictions, but
if they're fictions, what are we? Since they are
livelier than we are, exceed us in energy and in
dynamism, as Yahweh does also. It seems to me
that&mdash;I mean he may just be not at all an
attractive version of what Mr. Stevens wanted to call
the supreme fiction, but he is . . . he's quite a
fiction, he's very persuasive and as I keep saying in
the book I wish he would go away. I don't like him. I
don't feel anybody can like him. His famous definition
when Moses asks him his name&mdash;his famous
self-definition is ehyeh asher ehyeh, translated by
William Tyndale as "I am that I am" and that's kept in
the Authorized Version of the English Bible. The Hebrew
"ehyeh asher ehyeh" actually means "I will be, I will
be;" "I will be <em>that</em> I will be," or to make it
into better English "I will be present wherever and
whenever I choose to be present," but I say throughout
the book that also means "And I will be absent wherever
and whenever I choose to be absent." And he is very
distinguished by his absences, it seems to me. But if
he is just a literary character&mdash;well first of all
I don't recognize any distinction between literary and
human characters; I mean I'm notorious for that, and
why not be notorious for that&mdash;it seems to me that
the sacred Bloomstaff, as I call him, is at least as
real as old Bloom&mdash;Sir John Falstaff, of course.
But not even kidding, I mean what can you say about the
Yahweh of the J writer? He is endlessly memorable, he
is endlessly unreliable. [Pause.] But he gets inside
you. I repeat I would like him to go away, but he
doesn't seem to go away.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Why doesn't he go away?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, because I'm pretty sure
he is our equivalent&mdash;I mean, our equivalent for
him now is what our Uncle Siggy Freud called "reality
testing" and the Reality Principle. Freud says that
reality testing means that you have to "make friends
with the necessity of dying."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: So he's the name of everything
that opposes our will.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yeah, he is . . . [Pause.] I
think I remark somewhere in the book, with a certain
amiable&mdash;I wouldn't say <em>irony</em>, but a kind
of zest, that God had breathing trouble and this
trouble created the world. And I think I remark
something like, "Try to hold in your breath for as long
as possible, and then just before you can't stand it
any more, try to think something into creation, try to
will or think something, and see what happens." Which
always makes me think of Kafka's very grand remark to
Max Brod, where he says, "We are one of God's thoughts
when he was having a bad day." It seems to me he has
mostly bad days. But since I don't think there's any
distinction whatsoever between sacred and secular
texts, there's only great writing and bad writing (or
good writing in between I suppose or fair writing) then
it's natural to speak of&mdash;in fact, remember what
Blake says; he says religion is just choosing forms of
worship from poetic tales, and then he adds&mdash;this
is <em>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</em> &mdash;
"Thus men forgot that all Deities reside in the human
breast." But that doesn't mean that they don't reside
there. And of course, this is now a very tricky
business, because I'm not sure anybody&mdash;you're not
supposed to believe in Yahweh anyway if you are a
normative Jew, you're supposed to have Emunah, you are
supposed to trust in the covenant with him, but he's
never kept the Covenant himself, and I get awfully
weary of the Hebrew prophets who are always denouncing
the people of Israel for violating their covenant with
Yahweh when Yahweh hadn't kept his for a moment, and
always seems to be hard at work destroying his chosen
people. He seems to resent sometimes, precisely because
he had such trouble bringing them into existence I
suppose and they are after all according to that story
the original people that he brought into
existence&mdash;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: The title of Frank Kermode's
review is "Angry at God." Do you think anger is the
correct word?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: "Angry at God" is not what Sir
Frank says. That's on the front cover of <em>The New
York Review of Books</em>. If you look inside, Sir
Frank's review is "Arguing with God," and I think
that's what this book is, and an old Jewish tradition
is an argument with God.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: What adjective would you use to
describe your feelings about . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yahweh?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: . . . God?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I don't like him. I repeat I
wish he would go away. But somehow he doesn't. I don't
think I have any nostalgia for him. I wouldn't dream of
praying to him, but then I'm an Emersonian, and Emerson
in "Self-Reliance" says quite wonderfully, "As men's
prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds
a disease of the intellect." Now Christianity has
creeds; Judaism doesn't. Islam has creeds; Judaism
doesn't. There are now one and a half billion so-called
Christians in the world and one and a half billion
so-called Moslems in the world&mdash;those who have
submitted: which is what it means, Islam means
"submission." There are perhaps fourteen million Jews
still left, so obviously it's a thousand to one. The
fight got settled a long time ago, but on the other
hand there are even more Hindus. Nobody knows how many
people there are in India&mdash;they don't practice
birth control there, unlike the Chinese who so
rigorously try to keep their population from getting
completely out of hand; there may well be more Indians
now than there are Chinese&mdash;in any case, if you
add up all the Indians, excluding the Pakistanis or the
Moslem Kashmiris, if you add up all the Hindus and
other modes of religion in India which are not Moslem
or Christian, and you add in all the Taoists,
Buddhists, and Confuciusts, not only of China but of
the rest of Asia, and the Buddhists and Shintoists of
Japan, there are more non . . . what are we to call
them? Ultimately at the moment it seems to me that with
great crusader Bush leading us there is a kind of
religious war being fought between the Moslem world and
the Christian world, just as there is obviously a
religious war being fought between the state of Israel
and the Moslem world, which is why Israel is sitting on
top of that vast mound of atomic and hydrogen bombs in
Dimona, but in the long run I suppose the religious
future may well lie with the East.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Um hm. Would you think the word
"disappointed" would be a fair characterization? Would
you say that you are disappointed . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: . . .with Yahweh?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Yes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: No. I wouldn't have dreamed of
trusting him in the first place. So what is there to be
disappointed with? He is, he's bad news, he has always
been bad news. No, I'm not disappointed; I find him
very fascinating, very interesting. As I say, he's even
more interesting than King Lear, and to some extent at
least&mdash;well, Mark's Jesus and Hamlet run almost
neck and neck in interest. Each of them has incredible
mood swings, as Sir Frank points out, following me in
that part of his review. No I'm... [Pause.] Look, I've
been teaching how to read for 51 years now. I've been
writing and publishing criticism for 51 years. It seems
to me that what I've written in this book is really
just an extension of the book <em><a name="Anxiety" id=
"Anxiety"></a> The Anxiety of Influence</em>, which in
its first form was written back in the summer of 1967
when I was 37, and actually contained a rather savage
chapter on the Gospel of John, which I detached and
later published separately, and now in revised form
have put it into this book, so it's a pretty direct
line from one to the other. I was rather amused,
though, to see my old student Jonathan Rosen, in the
review that appeared in today's <em>Sunday Times Book
Review</em>, saying that: Well after all what
difference does it make that Wallace Stevens strongly
misread Shelley in order to produce characteristic
Stevens, what matters is religious truth, and, you
know, it is the truth or falsehood in regard to one
another of, say, Christianity and Judaism or of Islam
that matters. That may be Jonathan Rosen, but that
isn't me, and that isn't in the book that he's
reviewing. Not that I'm ungrateful for his review,
which you know certainly shows a warm heart, and
reminds me of a wonderful pun I once&mdash;quoting from
the Hebrew&mdash;of an almost Lewis Carrollian or
Joyceyan dimension, that I threw into an outrageous
public lecture here on the relation between the
so-called two covenants or two testaments. I also liked
the joke, which I'd seen before but hadn't seen for a
long time. It's an old Yiddish remark, that the
Christians stole our watch 2,000 years ago, and are
still telling us what time it is. I like that. It's
almost as good as my favorite Yiddish proverb, as I
translate it: "Sleep faster, we need the pillows."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: [Laughs.] I'm still fascinated
by the question of your relation to Yahweh, as you can
see.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, it seems to me no more or
no less vital or of concern to you as my close friend
or to me, as my relation to King Lear. I would have
great difficulty in saying what my relation to King
Lear is. I agree with Charles Lamb: you shouldn't even
go and see somebody try and act the part, because it's
unactable. What can you do with a figure who actually
stares up at the sky and cries out, "You heavens, you
should take my side because you too are old." That's so
marvelous and I can't imagine an actor enunciate it.
And I've never seen a Lear that worked. I think that
trying to play Lear would be rather like having a drama
in which somebody played Yahweh. Inconceivable.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: You do use one phrase here
which struck me very much. I was fascinated by it. I'm
not sure I can imagine you using it about Lear. You
speak of your "waning skepticism" about Yahweh.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, I have waning skepticism
about Lear also. I mean the difference is that I get
fonder and fonder of Lear, irascible old creature as he
is. Waning skepticism.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Yes, that's interesting. It's a
good surprising phrase. You expect the reverse.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I drag it in at the end of the
book because I got very bored by Sam Harris. You know
pragmatically there's no difference between Sam Harris
urging an end to faith; I would say fine, Judaism isn't
faith anyway. That's Pauline Pistis, the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. No,
the only question is whether you trust Yahweh or you
don't, and obviously you shouldn't and can't and
couldn't and won't, because he's bad news, as I keep
saying. He's as good an explanation for why everything
goes wrong all the time as we could want. And he's had
a terrible effect upon the world. Because in a somewhat
altered and perhaps even more aggressive form, he is
the Allah, which is a variant in Arabic on Elohim, of
the Koran, of the Recitation, and he utterly disappears
in Christianity, where God the father is just kind of
an unfortunate, weak imitation of Yahweh. [Pause.]
Surely it comes back to Leibniz, doesn't it? Which is
then picked up by the horrible Heidegger. Why should
anything be, anyway, rather than not be? Since Yahweh
puns on ehyeh, which is the ancient Hebrew verb for
being. I don't know. In the end I suppose if I have to
vote and go with any one, I go with Hamlet, who is a
nihilist as I read him. I think Shakespeare's
ultimately is nihilistic, not Christian, not even
Hermetist, just nihilistic, but I don't know that
pragmatically there's any difference between Yahwism
and nihilism. You know: is this a difference that makes
a difference? to invoke William James's, you know,
quite Emersonian definition of American pragmatism. It
doesn't seem to me that it is a difference that makes a
difference.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I see. So the phrase "waning
skepticism" doesn't mean "increasing faith"?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: No, there's no faith to be had
anyway. Certainly, the only issue is whether or not you
trust him. I don't trust him. He's not worthy of trust.
He is <em>very bad</em> . He is . . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: You speak often of the
Holocaust as&mdash;I take it that that for you is
emblematic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Oh sure. Oh sure, I mean
Yeshua, if he was crucified, was one of hundreds of
thousands of Jews who were being crucified by the
Romans in those days. And the biggest single holocaust
of Jews took place after Rabbi Akiba proclaimed Simon
bar Kosba, Simon bar Kochba or son of the star and said
he was the Messiah, ben Joseph, that is to say, not the
Messiah ben David but the Messiah ben Joseph, the
warrior who comes first. And that led all of the Jews
in the world into a terrific rebellion against Hadrian,
and millions of Jews were eventually slaughtered and
Akiba tortured to death at the age of 95; Bar Kochba
went down heroically, taking legions of Romans with
him. At one point in the book I have a sentence that
Jeanne, my wife, reading it, said "Harold, it shouldn't
be there; it will get you into trouble." But I'm glad
it's there, because you know the great phrase about
Yahweh in the Psalms and elsewhere is that Yahweh is a
man of war, and I think his most memorable single
appearance, and I talk about it, in the Bible, in
Tanakh, is in the Book of Joshua, where at one point
Joshua&mdash;you know it is after the death of Moses
and Joshua is in command of the Israelites and they
conquered Canaan, and before a crucial battle near
Jericho he notices an armed warrior. He doesn't
recognize him, and he boldly goes up to him, and he
says, "Are you one of us or one of them." And the
fellow replies, "The ground upon which you stand is
holy. Take off your sandals." At which Joshua takes off
his sandals and abases himself because he recognizes
that it is Yahweh a man of war come to fight in the
battle of Jericho, which he does, as he also fights,
you know, with the tribes that came to the battle in
the first Hebrew poem that we have, the song of Deborah
and Barak in Judges 5. So I have this sentence in the
book: "If Yahweh is a man of war, then Allah is a
suicide bomber." I think they are all bad news, Judaism
and Christianity and Islam. But I wanted to make clear
in the book that there is no such thing as a
Judeo-Christian tradition. That is absolutely
ridiculous. And fascinatingly enough there are two
things that I've said throughout my life when I've
addressed Jewish audiences, say at the Jewish
Theological Seminary or such places, and they always
get furious at me. But they're both true. One is that
nowhere in the whole of the Tanakh does it say that a
whole people can make themselves holy through study of
texts. That's a purely Platonic idea, and comes out of
Plato's Laws. That simply shows how thoroughly
Platonized the rabbis of the second century were. The
other one, which I say in this book and it has already
given some offense, is that in fact not only is
Judaism, which is a product of the second century of
the common era&mdash;and it's worked out by people like
you know Akiba and his friends and opponents like
Ishmael and Tarphon and the others, is a younger
religion than Christianity is. Christianity in some
form exists in the first century of the common era.
What we now call Judaism comes along in the second
century of the common era. Christianity is actually the
older religion, though it infuriates Jews when you say
that to them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I wanted to go back to your
comment . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I think my book is good clean
fun.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Well I thoroughly enjoyed it. I
wanted to go back to your comment. . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: But I don't think it's
irreverent.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: No.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Because I think the
category&mdash;you know any time you want to say that
some text is more sacred than another then you've made
a political statement, and I don't like political
statements. It is utterly insane that by vote of the
United States Congress, the Church of Scientology has a
tax exempt status. That means that <em>Dianetics</em>,
by L. Ron Hubbard, which I challenge anybody to try to
read, is a sacred text, by vote of Congress. And of
course what it is is very ninth rate science fiction.
Though it now has distinguished believers like, I
believe, Tom Cruise and&mdash;isn't John Travolta also
a Scientologist?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: To go back to your comment
about Yahwism and nihilism: What is&mdash;I don't know
how to put this question exactly&mdash;but what
is&mdash;why do you describe yourself as a Gnostic
rather than an atheist or an agnostic?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Ah, that's what my wife always
wants to know. She regards herself as an atheist.
[Pause.] I don't think I am.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>JB</strong>: [Whispers.]</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Bad wife.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Sorry, what did you say,
Jeanne?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>JB</strong>: I regard him as an atheist.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I see. That was "I regard him
as an atheist."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: No, no I'm not an atheist. It's
no fun being an atheist.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>JB</strong>: True! But what alternative is
there?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, the alternative is to
entertain all of these fictions. Remembering what Uncle
Wallace taught us, which is that the final belief he
says is to believe in a fiction, with the nicer aspects
of belief, that knowing that what you believe in is not
true. It's just imaginatively much more interesting to
be a Gnostic rather than an agnostic, to be fascinated
by Yahweh rather than indifferent to him. Walt Whitman
liked to say that the United States are in themselves
the greatest poem. Alas they're not, but it's a nice
idea. Yahweh is a great poem. [Pause.] I don't think
Jesus Christ is a great poem. [Pause.] I never quite
make up my mind about Allah, though I'm fascinated by
the fact that the Koran is the only book I've ever read
in which every single phrase is spoken by God himself.
It is the voice of Allah that you hear from the
beginning to the end, supposedly by mediation of the
angel Gabriel, being dictated to Mohammed, who however
doesn't write it down because supposedly he's an
illiterate, which baffles me, because he's a successful
merchant, and how could you have been a successful
merchant if you were illiterate, and couldn't read or
write? But supposedly he memorizes it and then he
dictates it&mdash;a very suspicious process of course,
but then no more suspicious than the formation of
Tanakh or the Greek New Testament. I don't say it in
this book, because I had said it in the book just
before, called <em>Where Shall Wisdom be Found</em>, in
the chapter there that reprints with a few
modifications a commentary that I'd written on the
Gnostic or quasi-Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,&mdash;I ask
every New Testament theologian I've known in this life
the same question; I've asked the great Pelikan this
question, at which he had just shrugged his shoulders
and walked off smiling amiably: How is it that we don't
have an Aramaic Gospel? Why is there no Nazarene
Gospel? Even though we know that no one who wrote
anything that is now in the New Testament had ever seen
the historical Jesus, had ever heard him say a word,
nevertheless, for any of this to make even an iota of
sense, that person did not go around speaking
Koin&eacute;, speaking demotic Greek. He went around
speaking Aramaic. Aramaic and demotic Greek are totally
different languages. The nuances of thought, expression
and spirituality of one are not readily translatable
into the other. How could you believe that you were
hearing the <em>ipsa verba</em>, the actual words of
the incarnate God, and not write them down and preserve
them? And what makes me even more suspicious is, you
will notice, as though they throw it in to show the
authenticity of this inauthentic schmaltz, all through
the Gospels suddenly you're thrown a phrase or two in
Aramaic, including, you know, the last words spoken
from the Cross. Why? And where's the rest of it?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: You say in the book when you
come to the question of why Christianity has been
appealing, I believe you say, it's the promise of the
resurrection.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, even more simply now
though: I was on Charlie Rose some weeks ago, and
Charlie, I suppose playing straight man&mdash;a hard
role for Charlie to play&mdash;said: To what do you
attribute the fact that you've just spoken of, Harold,
that there are a billion and a half Moslems in the
world and a billion and a half Christians and only
fourteen million Jews, how do you explain the enormous
appeal of these religions? I said: Well on the one
hand, in both Islam and Christianity, you're getting a
great deal in exchange for very little. All you have to
do in Christianity is say, "I accept that Jesus of
Nazareth was also Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the
anointed one or Messiah," and as a result you have life
eternal. And all you have to do in Islam, as they say,
which is what it means, is submit just to the statement
that Mohammed, who is certainly not divine and doesn't
pretend to be divine is nevertheless the seal of the
prophets, the final kind of a prophet and all you have
to do is submit to the will of Allah, and in return you
get Paradise. And of course there's also the fact, as I
said on Charlie Rose, that Christianity triumphed not
just because of that but because Constantine the Great
looked over what was available to him, including
Mithraism and so on, and said, "The right way to hold
the Empire together, the right state religion is
Christianity." So he swung the sword of Constantine,
and out went all the heretical versions of Christianity
also, including the Gnostics and we got the Church, the
Roman Catholic Church indeed. And then Mohammed, as the
Koran makes clear, and all the texts after
it&mdash;Mohammed is definitely a man of war and kept
defeating the Arabian Jews and he defeated the various
Arabian pagans, and after his death his Califs went on
and on and on magnificently (ah yes, beautiful wife)
magnificently went on conquering. So both Islam and
Christianity triumphed by the sword, and of course then
started engaging with one another&mdash;in the
Crusades, in Spain, in North Africa, and at the moment,
whether we like it or not, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
God knows where next.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I take it that you find the
Hebrew Bible not only aesthetically deeper than the New
Testament, but also that you find it&mdash;how shall I
say it&mdash;spiritually deeper?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: The only thing in the New
Testament that seems to me spiritually valuable is the
general epistle of James, undoubtedly written by a
disciple of James, that is to say Jacob the brother of
Jesus, by tradition anyway the brother. And that is
precisely what Martin Luther wanted thrown out of the
Bible&mdash;he called it an "epistle of
straw"&mdash;because it said specifically that faith is
not enough, that only works matter, and it ferociously,
like the prophet Amos and the first Isaiah, cries out
against those who oppress the poor. I'm not sure how
much spirituality really interests me in the Gospel of
Mark. The Gospel of Mark&mdash;and a couple of early
reviewers, in places like <em>Kirkus</em> and (what's
that other one?) <em>Publisher's Weekly</em>, got very
angry with me about this&mdash;and they both picked
this up and a couple of reviewers I've seen
since&mdash;where I say that in many ways the author of
the Gospel of Mark reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe, in
that he writes very very badly on a sentence by
sentence basis, and yet he's got a spooky kind of
universalizing imagination. You know, he dreams
universal nightmares, and it's very hard to get them
out of your head.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Like Dreiser, or Mary Shelley.
Both bad writers on the sentence level.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yeah. Oh yeah. Dreiser is
endlessly fascinating in that regard. <em>Sister
Carrie</em> breaks my heart, and <em>An American
Tragedy</em> hurts so much I hate rereading it. But on
a sentence by sentence basis they're impossibly drab
and dreadful. And it's quite true,
<em>Frankenstein</em> and <em>The Last Man,</em> as
prose are very badly written, but they work, they work.
And the Gospel of Mark I think is very badly written,
by an amateur writer, evidently a Jew in Rome, writing
at about the time, you know, word is reaching him that
the temple is being destroyed and the city is being
burned, and&mdash;it is very compelling. And then of
course I hate the Gospel of John because as I say
candidly in the book it hates me so I hate it. It keeps
saying that the Jews are all the children of Satan. Now
that's very interesting, in the whole of the Hebrew
Bible, except for one brief, rather muted reference, I
think in the prophet Zachariah, who's late, the only
place where Satan enters is not as a fellow named
Satan, a personage named Satan, but as the ha-Satana,
the accuser, the prosecuting attorney, at the beginning
of the Book of Job. But in the Greek New Testament, the
only character who matters besides Jesus Christ is
Satan, who is onstage almost non-stop. It's a
Satan-haunted piece of work.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Oh, speaking of being haunted,
there's a beautiful passage at the end of the book,
where you say "I very much want to dismiss Yahweh as
the ancient Gnostics did, finding in him a mere
demiurge who had botched the creation . . . . But I
wake up these days, sometime between midnight and two
A.M., because of nightmares [of] Yahweh" (p. 236).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Oh, yeah.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: And so . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: He frequently looks like Uncle
Siggy, in a three piece Edwardian suit, with a
beautifully groomed beard and hair, and flashing a
cigar at me. But Uncle Siggy&mdash;If asked what Yahweh
looks like, I wouldn't think of Blake's Nobodaddy, I
would think of Uncle Siggy.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Ah. It's a figure of
authority.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: But . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Uncle Siggy is obviously a
kinder and more humane personage than Yahweh.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I think I understand...</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: All this is just confirming my
wife's view that I am an atheist. But I'm not, I'm not.
[Laughs.] How uninteresting it is to be an atheist. I
mean, you can't make literature out of that.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Are you being diplomatic when
you say that? Do you think atheism is possible?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Diplomatic?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Well, I thought when I read the
book: I've always described myself as an atheist, but
maybe it's dishonest, maybe I should say I'm a Gnostic.
I'm angry with God. Perhaps that's Gnosticism.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yeah, I think if you argue with
God, or you're angry at God, if you have a grudge
against him, then that's much more fun than just saying
he's not there at all.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Do you think genuine
indifference is possible?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Well, remember we live in the
United States of America, under the reign of W. the
Great, who is on record as saying that Jesus Christ is
his favorite philosopher, and is sitting there in Camp
David at this moment, telling his intimates that he's
on a mission from God to install democracy in Iraq, and
will not cease, you know, till he either leaves office
or has done it. And I believe him, I think he is that
crazy. He is an authentic crusader, unlike his Papa,
who knew when to come home. And this is Jesus Christ
CEO, you know this is the American Jesus of the
Christian right. It's very interesting. There is no
Yahweh in the United States. I mean God the Father is
just about gone. There is of course the BVM, or as I
like to call her, thinking of her manifestation in the
Houston Astrodome, visiting the refugees there, the
BBB, the Blessed Barbara Bush. That's our deity, or one
of our deities. My wife is particularly fond of the
Blessed Barbara Bush. I guess I like her too. She is
very good value. It's fascinating that we have an
American Jesus, and he's always been an American, not a
Jew at all, but the Christian right has now so
compromised him, that when Hispanics come pouring into
this country from south of the border or the Caribbean
or further down, like so many African-Americans and
like so many increasingly poor whites in the South or
even in the Midwest, they're turning to Pentecostalism,
which is the fastest growing religious movement in the
United States, which has nothing to do with Jesus
really, or Jesus Christ. It's all about the Holy
Spirit, which is pouring down upon them and they're all
shouting and jumping with him. I'm not so sure that in
the end this will not be a Pentecostal nation. In which
case it's true pre-Scripture will turn out to have been
<em>The Crying of Lot 49</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Where does the idea of the Holy
Spirit come from?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Ah. On the basis of almost no
New Testament evidence&mdash;a dove or
two&mdash;Christian theology manufactured, needing a
third person for the trinity, along with God the
father, to finish Yahweh and Jesus Christ the
theological God&mdash;they needed another entity, so
they gave us the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. But he
never really took root in European or Middle-Eastern
Christianity, or in East European and Russian
Christianity. It's here in the United States that
Pentecostalism really took off, and it's burgeoning,
you know, every day. The largest single Pentecostal
unit is the Assemblies of God, and they just sort of
surge on in number all the time. There are independent
Pentecostal groups all over the country. I've got some
former students in Atlanta, who shall be
nameless&mdash;charming people&mdash;who are literary
critics, teachers of literature by profession, and they
are ferocious Pentecostalists. They&mdash;I attended
one such service in Atlanta, and there they were all
whooping it up and shouting when the Spirit hits them
indeed and crying out in strange tongues and defying
the laws of gravity, and it's all wonderful stuff. I'm
not being ironic. So it <em>was</em> his mother.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: The kids are getting restless,
so just one more question.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I know you must go home,
because it's going to be 10:30 before you get those
pussycats in bed.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Ok, one last question then. To
come back to this passage about wanting to dismiss
Yahweh . . .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Yes. Who wouldn't want to
dismiss him?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: . . . and being haunted. Now
the question is, why do you think you're&mdash;what is
it that&mdash;why are you haunted, what keeps bringing
you back?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: I read the Hebrew Bible. I
brood about it. It's a very strong text. Whether you
read it in the original, or you read William Tyndale
and Miles Coverdale, who between them write about
eighty-five to ninety percent of what you find in the
authorized version, and who are, with Shakespeare and
Chaucer the four great writers of the English language
as far as I can tell. Tyndale writes prose, Coverdale
does Psalms and battle hymns and so on. Both terrific
writers. And as I say, with Shakespeare and Chaucer,
the most powerful writers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: But you read the texts because
you're already haunted.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>; Well, Laura, you reread
<em>King Lear</em> and <em>Hamlet</em> because you are
already haunted, and then you get more haunted by
reading them. They are infinite. They go on forever, in
the same way the war song of Deborah and Barak or the
great chant in the Second Isaiah about the suffering
servant, palpably meant to be the people of Israel,
which becomes however in the Christian interpretation
the suffering Christ&mdash;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Yes. I just wondered if you
wanted to pinpoint what it is&mdash;what it
was&mdash;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: Remember you have to get your
pussycats home.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: Ok.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: But go on&mdash;one last
thing.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>; One last thing&mdash;just if
you wanted to pinpoint a little what it is that
prevents you from dismissing Yahweh.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: [Pause.] I think it's an
aesthetic matter.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>LQ</strong>: I see.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HB</strong>: But you know, how do we know
what an aesthetic matter is? Its dimensions are
endless.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="notes_content">
<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><sup><a name="1"></a></sup>1</sup>This
interview was conducted on November 27, 2005 after dinner.
Present are Harold Bloom, Laura Quinney, Jeanne Bloom,
Daniel Bloom, William Flesch, Daniel Flesch (9), and Julian
Flesch (5). The interview was transcribed by William
Flesch.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/quinney-laura">Quinney, Laura</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/bloom-harold">Bloom, Harold</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/yahweh" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Yahweh</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/biblical-studies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Biblical studies</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/atheism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">atheism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/agnosticism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">agnosticism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/new-testament" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New Testament</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/elisha-ben-abuyah" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Elisha Ben Abuyah</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jesus" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jesus</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/laura-quinney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Laura Quinney</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/frank-kermode" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Frank Kermode</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/moshe-idel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Moshe Idel</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/harold-bloom" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harold Bloom</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-tyndale" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Tyndale</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/wallace-stevens" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wallace Stevens</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gershom-scholem" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gershom Scholem</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/moses" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Moses</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ralph-waldo-emerson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-rosen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Rosen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/isaac-luria" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Isaac Luria</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/geoffrey-hartman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Geoffrey Hartman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/hans-jonas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hans Jonas</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-falstaff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Falstaff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/jerusalem" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerusalem</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/boston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Boston</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/gaza" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gaza</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/alexandria" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alexandria</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/new-york-city" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York City</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/japan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Japan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/china" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">China</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/israel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Israel</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/india" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/texas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Texas</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/asia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Asia</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/sinai" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sinai</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:24:46 +0000rc-admin16336 at http://www.rc.umd.edu